With the gross advertising budget of this nation being what it is, it is easy to believe that a tremendous amount of money and human energy goes into the production and maintenance of the billboard system across the country. The invention relates specifically to billboards.
There are two types of billboards in virtually universal use today. A smaller version, called the "poster" is ten feet high and twenty-four feet long, and may come with a metal frame. Typically, the poster is covered with several panels of paper which are glued to the billboard backing panel. Paper has the advantage that it is capable of mass production and printing processes, but suffers from a couple of major drawbacks. First, even when freshly printed, because the printing process utilizes ink, the resulting poster billboard tends to be dull and colorless compared to the bright, sharp colors available from a painting process. Secondly, the paper ordinarily weathers rather fast and begins fading and peeling. The ink on the poster ages more quickly than does paint.
The second industry standard is termed alternatively the "Bulletin", or the "Spectacular". In the event a complex pictoral is represented on the bulletin, printed paper may be used as on the poster. Ordinarily, however, plywood panels are used which are hand painted to produce a durable, clear, and very bright pictoral. From a visual standpoint, the painted plywood panels are much preferred to the paper. However, from a labor standpoint, these panels are very expensive, both from the production and the deployment standpoint.
In the case of most plywood billboards, artist's shops across the country are utilized to paint the billboards used in that particular locale. This is done, of course, because since there is no mass production technique that is really practical with the billboards anyway, and shipping costs are high, distribution of production to local centers is cheaper than central production. However, one drawback, which may not be major, is the lack of uniformity from one part of the country to the next between billboards and advertising presentations presented on them due to the diversity of artists.
In some occasional instances (for example, large Marlboro billboards which are oversized, being twenty feet tall and sixty feet wide) the plywood panels may be painted in one location by a particularly adept artist and shipped out on location. This is, of course, very expensive.
Regardless of how the plywood panels are made, once they are delivered to the hanging site, erection of the panels into place requires the use of a crane and ordinarily three men who work three to four hours on the project. This is particularly onerous costwise when it is considered that the panels must be moved and either reinstalled or painted over in a period of several weeks, requiring the same effort for the installation of another billboard.
One method that has been tried in order to avoid all or most of these problems has been the use of fabric stretched over the face of a billboard. Fabric has the advantage that it may be printed, painted, or silkscreened, it may be folded and is easy to ship like paper, it is lightweight, but it will take graphics as easily and as beautifully as does wood. An additional and most desirable feature stems from the fact that billboards of this type can be moved frequently from site to site, resulting in an increased exposure to the public.
Unfortunately, experience with fabric has shown that when stretched over the face of a billboard, under action of gravity, the fabric will wrinkle and stretch when exposed to the constant variations of temperature, humidity and precipitation of a billboard environment. For this reason, the use of fabric has been abandoned.